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Steve Gibson on Encryption and the NSA

Steve Gibson joins the show to talk about the latest revelations that the NSA is spending millions to break conventional encryption as they spy on us. Steve says that while the news is concerning, it only means that they're merely trying to do this. He says that the press all too often creates inflammatory headlines to sell content. There's no foundation to the rumor that the NSA has done all that. Encryption is still strong. They're just focusing on the weakest link in the chain.

What we really know is that the NSA wants very badly to circumvent privacy. We now know the NSA is intensifying ways to get around the security, but they haven't cracked encryption. Which is why they're going around it by exploiting back doors. That's why Steve says that BitLocker can no longer be trusted because Microsoft may have been pressured to build in a back door. He recommends going open source and using TrueCrypt.

The fact is, that the next generation cryptography breaking technology is still decades away.